I'm moving this to the JavaRanch forum so that some of the Sheriff's might be able to answer. Just to give you a tiny bit of history, Kathy Sierra started Java Ranch in January, 1998 and turned the site over to Paul Wheaton in January, 2000.

Jose Botella

Ranch Hand

Posts: 2120

posted 14 years ago

Another major event is dated on July 2001. They recruited me.

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Bert Bates

author
Sheriff

Posts: 8945

17

posted 14 years ago

I have a little more info... When Kathy started JavaRanch, she lived on a tiny little ranch called the 'nano-ranch'. She was studying Java, and when friends came to visit her, they called her place the Java Ranch, and the name stuck. By the way, she had a sheep at the time, named Bert (don't go there), who is immortalized in the bunkhouse book review. Bert the sheep was also the first sheep to be presented in the french edition of InfoWorld!

) I am probably the newest member to Javaranch. Just love it. BTW to take this discussion further what gave you the idea to design the bull with a fly around it ?? Sudeep Batra - Bond 007http://www.geocities.com/batra_for_u

I designed the Moose. Before merging my site with Kathy's, I already had forums. Kathy had something on her home page that said "Big Moose Saloon - coming soon!" and she had a cutesie moose. So when we merged the two sites, I took that name and stuck it on the forums (I almost went with "The Mangy Moose Saloon"). I then thought that a place with "moose" in the name would probably have a moose head mounted inside somewhere that would be the mascot. I decided that the moose head would probably be in a state of disrepair. I drew the first moose. I took my crappy drawing to an artist friend and she made a better drawing. Her first draft looked like a real moose! I made her simplify the art work so it would fit the motif. She agreed to do it on the condition that I don't mention her name! She feels that the quality of the moose is so low, she doesn't want her art friends to think that she's a poor artist! When she was done, I scanned it in and added the fly.